Patients waiting to be discharged with be affected, causing bed shortage

Patients in London have been subjected to some of the longest waits in Ontario for a hospital bed, but as bad as it’s been, labour strife threatens to make it worse beginning Friday.

Nurses, social workers and therapists who co-ordinate home care and place patients in nursing homes don’t want to strike but may have no choice in the face of an agency that walked away from the bargaining table, the Ontario Nurses Association says.

In Southwest Ontario, 450 may strike or be locked out at midnight Thursday in a job action that could leave nearly 3,500 on the picket lines in 10 of 14 community care access centres (CCAC) across the province.

“There are many CCAC staff not represented by ONA who will continue to work during any ONA strike,” wrote a spokesperson for the Southwest CCAC.

Asked twice how labour strife would affect patients, the Southwest CCAC didn’t answer questions from The Free Press about those seeking home care for the first time or expanded services. The agency wouldn’t even say how many nurses might go on strike or the number of managers that would replace them.

But Vicki McKenna, the nurses’ union’s first vice-president, says the impact will be acute. Hospitals may get squeezed at both ends. People who go without home care will be rushed to ER, while those in hospital beds, waiting to be discharged home, will languish, making the backup in emergency departments even worse.

“Imagine if people can’t be discharged from hospital,” she said. “The hospitals should be concerned.”

The Southwest CCAC says for patients who need to be discharged, the agency has contingency plans it wouldn’t reveal.

In their roles as care co-ordinators who act as gatekeepers for home care, union members — mostly nurses — say they have to manage a growing number of extremely ill patients and that their workload has placed at risk the safety of patients.

The union also is seeking pay hikes between 1.4% and 1.6% to keep pace with raises of counterparts in hospitals and retirement and nursing homes, McKenna said. Absent a deal, each of 10 union locals will meet Thursday night and decide its course of action.

Despite the looming deadline, the Southwest CCAC said it’s “optimistic” a deal will be reached.

That led to a quick reply from McKenna: “Then I guess they should pick up the phone.”

All 10 CCAC walked away from the bargaining table eight days ago after the nurses’ union presented a counter offer, she said. The Southwest CCAC misrepresented those talks in an e-mail to The Free Press, she said. The agency wrote nurses had not budged from monetary demands since talks began last spring, but it was the agencies, not the nurses, who walked away.